Mercury Sno Twister

Prove it! - Anchorage Press: News

Last Saturday a modest display of snowmobile history gathered in circle on Willow Lake, where a classic snowmobile show was held next to races hosted by the Willow Winter Carnival. A few yards from the starting line of a race called the “radar run” about two-dozen machines with all-but-forgotten names like Sno-Twister and Ski Wee competed for trophies by looking fresh, as if new and just out of the crate.

“It took about four months,” Alan Olson, of Fairbanks, says about the restoration he did on a 1974 Mercury Sno-Twister. “That’s after I found all the parts,” he says. “Thank god for eBay.”

The Sno-Twister was built by Mercury Marine, one of dozens of companies that either went defunct or dropped snowmachines from their business during the 1970s and early ‘80s.

Willow’s carnival is a small-town affair where many of the participants show up riding snowmachines to begin with. The town played host to an overnight sled dog race the weekend before, and other typical winter festival fare: cross-country ski racing; indoor craft vendors; dogs testing their strength against a weight-laden sleigh; and, naturally, outhouse races (once considered an oddity, outhouse races are now ubiquitous, if no less odd.)

But the second Saturday was all about snowmachines. That’s partly because of volunteers led by Ron Jenkins (“call me ‘Radar Ron,’" he says) who introduced the radar run to Willow Lake three years ago. Ron calls his radar gun “the speedometer de-lie-er.” He has two favorite phrases for riders who say their sled is faster than, say, 100 miles per hour: “Prove it” and “Let’s find out.”

“I hear this all the time,” Jenkins says, “They say, 'I’ve got a 600 and I was doing 120 across the lake.' And I go, 'Well, let’s find out.'”

Snowmobile speedometers are notoriously unreliable. They have been for decades. That goes without saying among experienced riders. The fastest speed Tom Kowalke has seen on his snowmachine speedometer was over 120 miles per hour. “That comes with a little caveat,” Kowalke says. “It’s the fastest that I’ve seen indicated on a snowmobile speedometer.”

Kowalke came in second place in the radar run’s open class, hitting 96.5 miles per hour. He rode a high-tech, 21st Century Yamaha called a Nytro XTC. It only takes high-octane racing gas, so Kowalke can’t fill up at just any gas pump. That runs him $10 to $12 per gallon, he says. “It’s worth it because it’s fun—it’s fun because it’s fast.

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